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The Buddha in the Robot; Science and Eastern Religion

Delivered to the Second Unitarian Church of Omaha NE April 13, 2003
By Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder
Perhaps the closest thing I have ever experienced to enlightenment occurred to me
in my freshman year of college while I was talking my Calculus final exam. You see
when I was in high school; science was by far my favorite subject. I loved chemistry
while almost everyone else in my class hated it. I even went to summer school once to
take an extra biology class. So when I was filling out my college applications I wrote in
under possible major: chemistry. However I quickly learned that high school chemistry
and college chemistry are two different things. I have this recurrent dream where I am
still in school but I have not done any of the homework or read any of the material and
the test or paper is tomorrow. This sense of impending doom was a palpable reality for
me during my first semester of college.
So when the day of reckoning came that fateful afternoon of my Calculus exam, I
approached the room with an emotion not unlike what people must have felt going before
the guillotine in eighteenth century France. Well as I struggled through the exam, half of
which was familiar, the other half written in Sanskrit, a thought came to me as if a
revelation. That if I changed my major, then this would be the very last math test that I
would ever have to take again for the rest of my life! And with that epiphany, a great
weight was lifted from my psyche. I began to watch the clock, only 45 minutes before I
never have to do math in school again! After an hour of intellectual wrestling, I turned
in my exam and went to the cafeteria and ate dinner with the satisfaction that comes only
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to those who know exactly where they do, or dont, belong in the grand scheme of the
universe. It was that day that I learned what I was not called to do. It is a good feeling
actually. It was much like the old limerick:
There was a great student from Trinity/ who found the square root of infinity.
It gave him such fidgets to count up the digits,/ he chucked math and took up
divinity.
I asked myself, What can I do that is the complete opposite of this? And that is
how I got into this line of work. This seems to be a common dichotomy in our culture
nowadays: science and religion are hostile enemies. I wont regal you with the grand
history of this conflict from Galileo to the present. However it is interesting to note that
Unitarian Universalists have been very interested in the overlap between science and
religion. Newton Mann, the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Omaha was one of
the first ministers in the country to reconcile Darwinian evolution with religious ideas.
He felt that these need not be enemies. Rather religion had something to learn from
evolution. The Unitarian theologian Ralph Burhoe started the journal Zygon; the Journal
of Science and Religion. Humanists in the twentieth century believed that science was
the ultimate means of understanding the world. Some people around the turn of the last
century believed that religion would eventually become obsolete. Andrew Carnegie set
up foundations to promote science and philanthropy because he believed that the religion
of his day was a dinosaur that needed to realize it was extinct.
Interestingly, in the last couple of the decades the new age movement has
developed an interest in the connections between science and religion, or should I say
spirituality. The new age movement is notoriously difficult to define, but basically there
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seems to be a theme within this rather expansive collection of beliefs and practices that
science, particularly particle physics, has confirmed some of their religious ideas. Now I
know even less about quantum physics than I do about the new age movement, so by no
means do I speak with much authority in this area. After all, you know how well I did in
Calculus in college! Not much room for me to go speculating on the nature of atoms and
the like. But as I understand it, some or maybe all, of these particles exhibit some
interconnection between them. If you take to photons and have them interact with each
other, they will affect one another. Furthermore, they will continue to affect each other
even when they are far apart. Sub-atomic particles appear to share some common
interconnection. How a physicist explains this precisely I do not know. However there
are people who see in this an explanation for the interdependent web. Others see it as a
way to explain ESP. Who knows if they are right or not? Perhaps Ken Wilbur is right
and science is confirming what the mystics have told us all along.
I should note that there are UUs on both sides of this issue. There are those who
believe that science, rather than religion is the worldview par excellence. The latter is
humanitys intellectual dead weight. But more and more new age ideas are becoming
popular among Unitarian Universalists. Maybe science can reveal to us the
interdependent web of life. In either case, science and religion seem to be occupying the
same turf. In one case they are hostile and in the other they are neighborly.
However, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had another view. He claimed
that science and religion are not in competition, nor in cooperation, for the same kind of
truth. They seek, and are interested in, fundamentally different things. Science is a
discipline of fact. It questions our assumptions of the world and seeks to prove or
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disprove them. People believed at one time, much like the young Dalai Lama, that the
sun revolved around the earth. By testing this assumption one gains greater
understanding about the facts of the world. And that is all. Science can either give us
facts, or pretty darn good guesses. But what do these facts mean to us? How do we use
them? What are their wider implications for our society or our personal lives? These
questions are questions of value and meaning. Religion is interested primarily in these
sorts of questions. What does it mean if we can some day clone a human being? Should
we? What does it say about human nature that we now have, and could very easily,
destroy countless lives with awful weapons? Or what does it say about us that we can
save so many lives with medical technology?
Religion does not seek what is measurable, testable, or objective. The great
Protestant theologian Karl Barth believed that religion itself was a totally other category
of existence in no way related to the natural phenomenon that science seeks to capture.
Barth may overstate things a bit but his point is well taken. Religion deals with
existential truth not empirical truth. Woody Allen once asked if it were possible to see
the human soul in a microscope. Perhaps, he thought, but it would have to be one of
those really big ones with two eyepieces. While I was in Rochester Minnesota last week
for the District Annual Meeting, I attended a workshop where the topic of discussion
came around to what is theology. I reflected that theology is what ever in your life that
keeps you from waking up in the middle of the night screaming about the utter
meaninglessness and absurdity of the universe. I submit to you that science will be of
little help here. Well, psychiatry might, but physics and chemistry by themselves offer
little solace.
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While I agree with Goulds view that ultimately science and religion are two
different and equally valid explorations of different dimensions of human life, I also
understand human curiosity. It is not enough, particularly for us religious liberals who so
highly value reason in religious living, for us to simply write, there be dragons! on the
nautical map of religious living. Science two is predicated on an insatiable curiosity of
wonder and doubt. If science and religion are doing two different things, then we must
prove they are doing two different things. We must push the frontier from both the side
of science looking at religion and religion looking at science. The hard part is finding
someone who knows both equally. I have heard scientist claim that the science/religion
discussion is often initiated by religious people and therefore has a bias toward proving
the Bible with science. Whenever I have been a part of the discussion I have always been
frustrated that the scientists trot out Einstein, Bohr, and Fynaman, and compare them to
either Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century or literal fundamentalism. There are
more sophisticated religious thinkers than that out there.
One of the few books to get the balance right, in my view, is The Tao of Physics
by Fritijof Capra. Capra claims that Eastern religion and quantum physics are not the
same, but complementary. They are describing the same elephant from two different
sides. Capra himself has backed away from some of the conclusions he made in the Tao,
partially because it became a classic of the new age group I mentioned earlier, and he
wanted to distance himself from it. Nevertheless, it remains a strong influence among
many people particularly those of us who practice Eastern religions. As we saw with the
story of the Dalai Lama discovering on his own that science can contradict the religious
texts he was reading, many people think that there needs to be a complementary
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relationship between religion and science. The Dalai Lama, and other Tibetan Buddhists
who have followed his lead, has actually taken this a step further. Once when he was
meeting with Carl Sagan, the Dalai Lama claimed that if science could disprove
reincarnation, then Buddhism would have to come up with something else! Imagine the
Pope making a similar statement about a long held Catholic doctrine!
However, there is another way to approach the issue. In his book, The Buddha in
the Robot, Masahiro Mori reflects on science as a source of religious understanding.
Mori is a professor of robotic engineering at the Japanese answer to MIT. He is also a
Buddhist. In his book he talks about the work that he does building robots, thinking in
new and different ways about how to mimic or improve things that you and I take for
granted. His job as an engineer requires that he see the world through the eyes of one of
his robots. A friend of mine in Japan actually met Mori. He was giving a lecture and one
day he told his student to take out a coin. A 100 yen coin is about the size of a quarter.
He told his students that their only homework for the night was to tell him what shape the
coin is. The next day all of these very bright engineering students came to class and
proudly declared that the coin was a circle. Really, replied Mori. Then what shape is
the hole in the pop machine that you put the coin into? A rectangle! To a robot, a coin
is a rectangle just as surely as it is a circle.
Mori tells the story of eating dinner with a friend of his. In the middle of the
meal, he said to his friend, When does this piece of meat or vegetable I am about to eat
become me? Right now it is on my chopstick, but is it me when I chew it up? When it
is in my esophagus? My stomach? When does the air around me, become part of me?
What about the water we are drinking? Do these things cease to be themselves? He
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came to see that there is no clear cut dividing line between what is part of me and what is
not. But at the same time, one cannot say the water I drink is exactly the same thing as
me. There is difference. Water is not meat. Vegetables are not air. I may be connected
to these things, yet they have their own identity. In this way the interconnections that are
necessary for all of life to come into being become very real to my experience. I can
understand Moris explanations much easier than I can the rather esoteric comparisons
between someone like Nagarjuna and Werner Heisenberg.
Mori claims that these interconnections extend not only to biology, but also to the
machines that he creates. His basic premise is that Robots have Buddha-nature. Meaning
that robots and machines also participate in this multi-layers web of existence with us.
We are dependent upon them just as they are dependent upon us. Another example he
gives is driving a car. Most if not all of us drove or rode in a car to get here this morning.
Normally we understand ourselves to be driving the car. We are the one telling the
machine what to do. I push on the break and I slow down, I turn the wheel to the right
and the car goes right. However, Mori says, it could be that the car is driving us as much
as we are driving it. A car has a particular configuration of controls; two or three pedals,
a steering wheel, maybe a gear shifter. We have to conform to the cars set of rules for it
to obey us. We have to press the gas in order to go faster. There is no other choice. Just
as the previous example we see that the car and the human form an interdependent
system. This interdependence is itself Buddha.
My friends, everyday we see on the news examples of the might of science and
technology. The American military has some of the most impressive and sophisticated
pieces of machinery in the world. We use everything from laser sights, to GPS bombs,
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and spy satellites. It is because of our high level of technology that we can even see these
things in the first place. Reporters can literally film a live firefight in real time. And yet
I cannot help but reflect that science is neutral in times of war. Might does not make
right. Religion asks the questions about values and meaning and the reasons for why we
are here. In this regard religion has much catching up to do to reach sciences level of
sophistication. What are the implications of this war for future conflicts? On our
standing in the world? Is it right to protest a war in which my neighbors are sacrificing
themselves? Should I rejoice with people who have been liberated? Just how am I
supposed to vote in the next election? I seem to have a lot of good questions without any
good answers. When I handed in that Calculus exam so many years ago I traded in one
set of difficult problems for a whole new set.
May our religious sentivities come to equal our technical expertise. And may we
all see the Buddha in everything including the wind, the flowers, and the robots. Amen
Blessed Be.
Recommended Reading:
Capra, Fritijof. The Tao of Physics
Horgan, John. Rational Mysticism; Dispatches from the Border between Science and
Spirituality
Mori, Masahiro. The Buddha in the Robot; a Robot Engineers Thoughts on Science and
Religion
Tricycle Summer 2003. Buddhism and Science Special Edition